We spent our last morning in Arenal on the farm roads. We started the morning by walking down to white hawk villa, but backtracked after not finding much activity. On the trail just past Phil’s villa, we were pretty excited to be able to confidently separate 2 rufous mourners from the pihas we’d seen the days before. We weren’t as confident in the initial ID until we got great looks at its lookalike.
Across the Danta hanging bridge, we paused at the shelter to watch a laughing falcon hunting a farm field. As we continued along the dirt road just past the house, we saw 2 emerald tanagers in the thicket along the river. Our biggest “boom” of the day was at the brown road shelter, where we ran into a mind-blowing pocket of bird activity! There were so many things moving in and out of the lush foliage that we couldn’t ID everything we glimpsed. We were so glad to get excellent looks at (and even bad photos of) a blue-and-gold tanager. I got a glimpse of a slate-headed tody-flycatcher that Paul saw better. I saw possibly both a tawny-capped euphonia and slate-throated redstart in the same tree, but Paul only saw the euphonia, so I only counted that too. It’s always great to get lifer warblers, and there we saw a tropical parula!
We continued back around to the work shed before taking (I think) the black blaze road back. Along this road, I was thrilled with another lifer warbler: gray-crowned yellowthroat! As we continued along our way, we saw several Morelet’s seedeaters.
We continued to bird the rest of our time there, that was a wrap on my lifer additions from this fabulous trip!